Great run down. Hoping some small 70kg mid/forwards costing 117k are picked so everyone jumps on them. Only win I had was missing the three poor performing eagles, bombers and from memory one other little forward who didn't do much.
NGA - not sure why they they don't apply the same rule to everyone, if you makes finals (there is a cascading formula depending on what level of finals you make, which looks fine), you cannot pick them inside top 40. Maybe more stringent than current rule for the northern 4 teams where if you make finals, you cannot get any inside top 40 pick.
DGR - how does this work and when would it likely happen.
I expect we get no free hit OR for team, maybe best 12, then best 18 whenever there is a bye for two teams or more. Interested to how strategically the DGR will play into thinking.
Tricky part around best 12 in OR is the incentive to pick premiums playing that round, although, this could be a trap (maybe) if those players leak points from round 2 onwards.
Guessing price rises happen after 3rd game still which means it may be staggered in 2024 with most players changing price in round 4.
DGR simply means that they combine R0 and R1 into a single round and the guys from the teams playing R0 each have two scores that round. For price changes it counts as two individual games, for captaincy/round score as one score. It only works though if you then have full best 22 in the bye rounds as you then have a genuine decision of the double scores and fielding a rookie/possible donuts/forced trades. They use it in just about all the other formats on RDT (EPL, NBA, BBL, etc) so it's obviously not hard to code. IMO if they went best 18 with DGR it would be broken and everyone would just load up on the R0 premiums as you basically just get bonus points in round 1 and very minimal cost in the byes.
I like this option the most as the strategy around it is definitely interesting and there's opportunities to walk different paths, which I personally think should always be the driving factor of any decision they make, for mine the absolute worst part of SC the last 5 odd years is the sameness of all the sides.
I think best 12 is a lot harder to work, both the programming aspect, and the practical aspect that forcing people to pick at least 12 players from those 8 teams is pretty brutal and also does the complete opposite of the "creating diversity in teams" idea I mentioned above, the pool of players from that group of sides is actually very small and you'd be basically locking everyone into about 12 out of 15 premiums because there's maybe 4 rookies in that bunch total and none of the better ones at this point in time. You can basically bet that every side is going to be Daicos, Newman, Gawn, Grundy, Flanders and the 5 genuine premium mids and then Lloyd/Whitfield/Short and Curnow/Bolton/Martin decisions. Honestly if they do best 12 looking at those sides I'm pretty sure I just wont bother this year.
Honestly I think the AFL has created a "least worse" option here for the fantasy comps. There are no good solutions or opportunities.
Free hit round - Have a bad round 0 and it's delete time, people could be 500 points back with a couple of wrong selections. Given every side will then look the same at round 1 as it has for 5+ years now, there's no clawing that back against 1000 people that far ahead of you.
Best 12* - As above
DGR - Complexity for the casuals, it works in the hardcore formats because only hardcores do them but SC/AFLF are more casual oriented comps. Also compromises how they've handled bye rounds and that's a spanner and if they don't do the bye rounds right it will basically have all the negatives of the best 12 above, every side will be the same as you'll be forced to overload r0 guys.
Not counting it at all - Messes up price changes hugely and also makes the bye treatment pivotal or those players become unselectable, creating all the issues of best 12 in reverse...
Such a cockup by the AFL to shaft the fantasy side of their supporter base like this and for such a stupid reason.